Where?
 

is the most conveinent/cost effective place or virtual place to get these items
???


Oh and back on topic, after doing lots of reading on my own (Googling for hours, hitting all kinds of G37 threads and oil tech threads all over the net), I pretty much came to the same conclusion as semtex for my post-breakin oil setup: Motul 300V + K&N HP-1008. Motul was the best-quality/reputation synthetic oil I found that was definitely Ester based, and most of the oil filter data out there pretty much adds up to "Mobil1 and K&N have the same guts and they're the best commercial spin-on option available if you're willing to pay for them".

I'm still kinda undecided on which weight of Motul, but probably 5W30 given that we don't really get below-freezing weather here (well, once a year we get it for a few days by a few degrees, but not really).

Here's some other random oil stuff from all my Googling:

FilterMag - A reusable plastic half-shell that sticks to the outside of your oil filter, has a bunch of Neodymium magnets on it to trap ferrous particles as the oil comes into the filter (before the filter element). I figure worst case it keeps the big metal chunks from clogging the filter so much, but they claim it also traps a lot of tiny abrasive metal particles that filters will pass (in the single-digits of microns and below). The 250-series size fits our oil filters. I went with the RA250. I don't really understand what's up with the HP250 - it costs more and has less total magnet strength, and is considered the High Performance version. Perhaps it's just that the plastic shell is tougher or something.

It's all commonly available stuff (the filters and oil I chose), you can just put the product names into Google and find hundreds of places that sell them.

^The Motul can be a little hard to find, depending on where you live.

THanks! will probably add a magnetic plug as well. I didnt know if there was a preferred forum sponsor who dealt with maintenance items like these. I guess you cant pick up Motul at big box stores.:driving:

BTW I got my FilterMag in the other day, it's pretty nifty and the magnets are insanely strong. At next oil change I'm going to cut open my filter and see what it managed to trap. I'm dubious about their claims that it's really stopping anything that a good filter wouldn't stop, but I figure if it sucks up some metal and keeps it from clogging the filter, all the better.

Wow. Thanks for sharing your experience, Jesse. Yeah I've heard from a number of people that once you switch over to Motul, you will actually feel the difference. I can't wait to make the switch now! Regarding Mobil1 not being a true synthetic, can you elaborate on that? I'm just curious as to how it's not a true synthetic, what constitutes a true synthetic, etc.

This might help

When is a synthetic a synthetic?

I too have done a lot of research on oils that will work well with the VVEL system, but I haven't come across any definitive answers as to what types of "esters" are actually in the Nissan Ester Oil. I originally wanted to use Mobil 1 due to it's quick cold weather pumping, lower friction, and better durability in high temps, but I'm going to stick with the Ester Oil until I figure out if another oil is actually safe to use in the LONG TERM with the VVEL system. All the Nissan dealers I've spoke with, as well as Corporate Nissan, have told me repeatedly that the Ester Oil is required and not using it could void your warranty (despite what the owners manual says!!!).

Saying you will "feel" the difference by switching oils is the placebo effect with a shot of nitrous.

If the specs of the oil were the only thing that mattered, then the UOA's from oils like Motul and Amsoil would put brands like Castrol and Pennzoil to shame. There is not enough data to know which brands will protect the VQ35VHR the best, but the highly acclaimed Motul did not provide as much protection on the VQ35DE as simple dino Castrol GTX. So, don't be so concerned about the base stock of the oil.

When high rpms are involved, friction becomes a critical factor. Drag increases exponentially with piston speed, so you're going to do some different things in a 16k rpm motorcycle or 14k rpm F1 engine than you are in a 7-8k rpm street car.

Fixed.

Don't get caught up in the hype. Motul is a racing oil, so if you car is used for purposes other than the track there are better options that cost much less money.

I've had some WICKED dreams with chantix but didn't help me to quit. However, I've been smoke free for 3 days now and that was because I was bedridden due to a surgery for two weeks. Hopefully I can keep it up.

/offtopic

The real world isn't a binary proposition between "drive like grandma" and "track it hard every day". There's a lot of in-between.

^ very true. That's why I can't understand why people would pay so much money for racing oil when there car will be used for purposes other than racing.

Give me your address. If you get tempted to start up again I'll send around a friend to break both your legs and send you back to bed for a while :tup:

Keep it up.

the guy that told me about motul said that its the best out there and he had a customer there and he asked him how motul was working for him and he said great. the mechanic said that once i make the change i will never go back so im hoping its worth the price.

how can not using ester oil void your warranty? its says use 5w-30 in the maintenance book right? so how can it void your warranty? is there any truth to that?

In case anyone is wondering, here's what the Project Kics magnetic drain plug that we were discussing a few pages back looks like installed:

http://www.the370z.com/members/semte...2-p1000856.jpg

http://www.the370z.com/members/semte...1-p1000854.jpg

so if the maintenance booklet says 5w-30 then you can pretty much use any good brand of oil if its 5W-30 and they cant do **** about it right?

I'm guessing it's a worthwhile investment for $18? Do they use regular washers found in benchstocks?

KICS-DRAIN-PLUGKics Project Magnetic Drain Plug 1 $16.00 $16.00PLUG-SIZE: MAG2-23296 Shipping:UPS Ground: $7.93Sales Tax: $1.48-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Total: $25.41


I ordered it on the 10th of this month, I'm still waiting! I could have drove the 60 miles and picked it up. If you order one, order well ahead of your scheduled oil change!

That's weird. I had mine in 5 days. I wonder if they ran out of them or something.

Well, I have to play devil's advocate here, even though I have some Motul on order...

It's not necessarily true that racing parts and fluids are even better on the street, although it often works out well. Remember that in higher-end racing, engines are constantly rebuilt and fluids are changed after every race. Therefore they don't really need to worry about long-term wear, they just want protection from failure for one race, and the thinnest fluid they can put in there because thin, slippery oil gives a little horsepower bump.

All oils have to be purified and refined, including vegetable oils. It's not like the veggies are grown in a clean room, and even if they were you still have plant matter to separate out.

Personally, I don't give a crap about whether the oil is biodegradable, and I bet you still have to dispose of it at the oil dropoff at your favorite auto parts place. You're involved in CA EPA stuff: do you think an EPA representative would witness you dumping Motul into the soil and be ok with that?

I don't plan on drinking my motor oil, and I would never put fruit punch or glow-stick fluid in my engine, so this is irrelevant.

Polarized does not mean magnetic in the general sense, although permanent magnets can be said to have the majority of their atoms aligned along a given polarity axis. Here's a video about ferrofluids, which are actual magnetic liquids. Motul does not do this:

Have not read the whole thread, but in many of the oil analysis tests done, Motul has not performed well on the VQ. Well at least in past generations of the VQ engine.

Just because an oil is good for racing doesn't mean it will be good for street driven cars. In fact, it might mean just the opposite. Here's a chart from the VQ35DE and Motul's numbers are worse than Castrol GTX.

http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/i...Comparison.jpg

This chart is from one of the best oil threads I have seen. Check out the thread if you have a few spare hours.

VQ Oil Analysis and Info

Wow @ Torco

Great link, lots of good distilled info there. The whole Ester/Motul issue is covered well if you read through it. Basically, they're saying Motul-like oils look great on paper and probably perform great in racing applications (high heat and stress, not much time sitting around the garage oxidizing), but that in a consumer application where the oil isn't heated up and gets to sit around oxidizing more, it may convert itself into a worse oil. This sounds like something that (a) probably is true for many daily-drivers, and (b) is probably highly dependent on individual patterns in driving, mileages, storage lengths (is it often left garaged for days?), local weather, etc, etc..

I'm a little suspicious of the overall graph you pasted, in that it seems that the mean (and deviations) being measured against are going to be heavily influenced by the existing popularity of various brands of oil among those contributing UOA's, since the mean is based on total samples received. It might be interesting to re-run the numbers by first averaging together groups of samples of the same brand/type, then deriving the mean by averaging those numbers together (so that they aren't popularity-weighted).

Still, thanks for posting that, it's very useful information. I'm still going with the Motul on my next change, so we'll get to see how the UOA goes in my case.

Hey wstar, how far off is your next change? I just crossed over the 2000 mile mark, so at this rate, I won't be doing my next change until August.

The smaller the sample, the more suspect the numbers. Torco was only used by one person, and that could've been a newer car still in the break-in phase, we don't know.

It would be much more relevant to calculate standard deviation per motor-oil, but that wasn't done because the results would look terrible. The small samples are completely understandable since the creator (Resolute?) only had access to UOA's submitted by forum members, and the effort was pretty cool considering the effort involved. Still, the results are not reliable for most brands.

:iagree: The sooner we run out of oil, the sooner these arguments will finally be put to rest.

I just crossed over the 3100 mark. I'm kinda torn between waiting for 5K (the whole "finish breaking in on dino oil" thing), versus just doing it at say 4K (so that will be 1800 on my factory oil then 2200 on the Nissan Ester I put in, then straight to synthetic). Knowing me, I'll probably go ahead and pull the trigger shortly after 4K. It can't be that big a difference anyways, and I think I've done a good job breaking it in so far all over the RPM range, including one rather loud and fun late night drive where I ramped up and down around 5-7K RPM on the freeway for long enough to get the oil up around 255. If anyone had been around (it was empty) they would've thought I was crazy :)

It figures, it never fails, I pitch a bitch, and the tables get turned! I just got the e-mail, it's on it's way, via UPS!:happydance:

So back on the statistics stuff, as some of us have already pointed out, while the table from that 350Z thread is really nice work, it's also too small a sample size to draw any real conclusions from. Some of the data values are suspicious relative to each other as well, probably due to different analysis companies and different tests run (granularity of the data, and some zeros seem to really be missing data). It's really too small for statistics for that matter, but we have to do what we can with what little data we have.

All that said, I re-ran the numbers from that graph through a Google Docs spreadsheet, and I recalced the red/green squares like I described before just to see what kind of difference it makes. As expected, there are fewer of both reds and greens when the popularity effect is cancelled. Especially in such a small sample, this popularity effect made a big difference in both the average and the standard deviation (4 samples of Syntec vs 1 sample of 300V for example. Imagine if it were 40 to 1, and how that would affect which ones get flagged as statistical outliers).

The following is basically the same as the original (red = 1+ std dev high, green = 1+ std dev low), but the mean and std dev are based on using the averages of each oil type, rather than looking at all raw samples, so that the oils are on the same footing regardless of popularity. You'll see some of the same trends, but there aren't nearly as many reds, and hardly any greens. Mostly the widening of the deviation just re-iterates how little we know statistically speaking about these oils. Any of these samples could be complete flukes. Anyways:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...ty-effects.png

ETA: That's about as much as I'm willing to mess around with it, but really you could go further in making it "fairer" by grouping the ones that are based on similar formulations. The fact that some formulations are sampled in multiple weights distorts everything too (see # of Mobil1 columns vs # of Eneos columns, for example). We've got so little data to go on though, the rewards of further re-analysis are pretty slim.

Here's the oil analysis thread on the VQ35HR. 2007 VQ35HR Engine Oil Analysis - MY350Z.COM Forums

Actually, it may be coming even sooner than expected now. I just met a really cool girl, been on a couple of dates. It's going really well, and she lives way on the other side of town, it's about a 35 miles each way. My mileage per week is about to skyrocket :)

:bowrofl: That's awesome, man! Congrats. Oh btw, :pics:

And I'm not talking about your car either. :rofl2:

:worthless:

Sorry to disappoint, but I've seen how this goes on other forums. 3 pages from now someone will have traced the picture back to her myspace account, figured out all of her personal info, and be calling her and harassing her. No thanks :)

Dang it! Foiled again.

Ok, ok, here's a pic (of my blackstone oil analysis kits that came in today ;)):

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...lysis-kits.jpg

Hopefully these will give us some insight on the whole Motul issue in the future.

I'm gonna do this too. The more data points the better. Are you getting an analysis done on your next drain? (i.e., the Nissan Ester Oil) I think I'll do one on my next drain, which will be the Nissan oil, then again the first time I drain the Motul.